Watt Center’s Impact on L.A.

Having read Bill Boyarsky’s column (“Art Snyder, in the Sprint for Growth,” Metro, Dec. 15), I hasten to suggest the prime weakness in its comment on the City Council’s approval of the Watt City Center project.

The project will not “dump an estimated 250,000 vehicles a day onto the Harbor Freeway. . . .” In fact, it is so tightly circumscribed by traffic mitigation measures that when it is finally built and 100% occupied, with its traffic demand management program in place, in the evening peak hour it will generate at any single point in time, less than 10 cars southbound on the Harbor Freeway between the project location at the 8th Street southbound on-ramp and the Santa Monica Freeway.

The Chicken Little approach to municipal planning, which calls for planners, journalists, and “activists” to run about flapping their wings and shouting that “the sky is falling,” does little to promote the much more difficult process of hard work and long-term planning for traffic movement and economic growth intertwined, which is exemplified by the Watt City Center project--and which is critical to the future of downtown Los Angeles.

The Watt project was approved by the City Council simply because it did its work and participated in that planning, and by its construction does more to solve downtown traffic problems than it does to create them. (Ditto, by the way, for housing problems, child care, job training, public spaces, urban beautification, and a number of other issues not mentioned in Boyarsky’s column.)

The importance of my role in the project was not the selling of it to the council, but the structuring of it in its conception as a program whose approval would be to the advantage of the entire city, not just to the builder--and which would be and was finally approved on it own merits.

ARTHUR K. SNYDER

Los Angeles